Articles by Suresh D Tendulkar

Comparable all-India estimates of the number of workers and unemployed in 'below poverty line' households - together defining the poor in the Indian labour force - are presented for 1993-94 and 1999-2000. Also presented is the gender, activity-status and the rural-urban composition of this group for the two time points. From a level of 115 million (43 million females and 21 million urban) the number of working poor declined by a little over 12 million - almost entirely in rural India - over the six-year period. Over 51 (36) per cent of the rural (urban) working poor were engaged in unskilled manual labour with a further 46 per cent (44 per cent in urban India) being absorbed by low-productivity self-employment.

The Evolution of Economic Policy in India: Selected Essays by P N Dhar; Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003; pp 255.

In debates over Indian poverty trends in the 1990s, questions have been raised about the comparability of the quinquennial 50th and 55th rounds of the consumer expenditure survey (CES) carried out by the National Sample Survey Organisation in 1993-94 and 1999-2000. These focus on possible interference between alternative reference periods used to elicit expenditure data from sampled households. This paper resolves these concerns, using comparable consumer expenditure data from the employment-unemployment survey (EUS) of the 55th round, as well as data from four experimental rounds of the CES, conducted between the quinquennial larger scale 50th and 55th rounds. It shows that the size distributions of consumer expenditure from the 55th round CES are comparable to ones from the 50th round - subject to appropriate recalculation - and that there is accordingly unambiguous evidence that poverty in India declined in the 1990s, in all dimensions. Indeed, the average annual rate of reduction in the last six years of the 1990s is shown to have been higher than that between 1982 and 1993.

In the context of the controversy over the trends in poverty in India in the 1990s, this paper addresses the question of using the National Accounts Statistics (NAS) estimate of private final consumption expenditure (PFCE) in place of National Sample Survey (NSS) based estimate for calculating the proportion of the population below the poverty line or headcount ratio. A comparison is undertaken for the year 1993-94 between NAS estimate of PFCE and household consumer expenditure estimated from NSS disaggregated across item-groups of consumption and across selected fractile groups of the rural and urban population. Two alternative estimates from NAS - old series in NAS 1998 and the latest revision in NAS 1999 - are compared. Similarly, two alternative NSS estimates are considered - one directly available using a uniform 30-day reference or recall period and a synthetic one constructed to reflect the effect of using non-uniform reference period. The analysis of comparison of these four estimates suggests two major conclusions. One, the issue of accepting NAS estimate of PFCE as more correct and reliable than NSS estimate is far from settled. Two, the item groups that accounted for a very large proportion of the aggregate discrepancy between NAS and NSS estimates had a much smaller budget share in the consumption basket of the bottom 30 per cent fractile group in the rural and urban areas, whereas in respect of item-groups which together accounted for over 75 per cent of the consumption of the bottom 30 per cent, the divergence between the two estimates was much smaller than on the average for all item groups and negative in some cases.